Excel at Dropshipping Using Organic Social Media Marketing
Surpass your competitors and be successful at what you do best ‘dropship’ with these organic social media marketing techniques. Find out the best social platform for dropshipping and more.
Social media works completely differently for consumers and businesses. You may post the picture of a cat and garner hundreds of likes in a minute, but when you promote your products, getting likes and engagement on them is not as simple. What is the reason?People are looking for entertainment on social media and that’s what the algorithms try to provide them. These algorithms are intelligent and can easily sense marketing posts and curb their reach. You may have experienced that even in your feed, you only see those marketing products that they were pushed by the Facebook algorithm. These posts fall under the ‘sponsored content’ category and we are not here to discuss that. There are a few ways in which social media communities and pages can increase the reach of the products they sell. JungleVT is one page that often promotes the products of BlueCrate website. But it only promotes those products that are really innovative and solving the pain points of the Facebook users. For example, take a look at this stress relieving punching bag product by JungleTV. After it was posted, people soon started sharing it, leading to 5400+ orders of the product through BlueCrate. This is just one example of how you can still increase the organic reach.
What is Dropshipping?
For some time now, we are seeing on the Internet: what would be the eldorado of e-commerce? The dropshipping?
But, what is dropshipping? Let me answer you!It is a process in which you arbitrage products by buying them from merchants for a lower cost and selling to the buyers for a higher cost. The only difference is that you directly ship the product from merchant’s warehouse to the customer’s house.Dropshipping is one of the easiest businesses that anyone can start on the internet. Most dropshippers use paid marketing to sell products because SEO takes a lot of time. This business is mostly based on impulse buying, i.e., anything that the users are willing to purchase instantly. They promote products that are between $10 and $50. That’s the one reason people prefer to sell their products on social media because search engines take a lot of time to rank posts. And, during this time the trends of the products fade away.But recently, things have started to change!First, because newcomers to dropshipping are looking for zero-cost marketing strategies through which they can promote their products. Second, GDPR policy has changed the ecommerce game.
GDPR and Its Effect on Dropshipping
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has made social media marketing policies stricter. Ecommerce store owners that were previously able to market products directly to customers using their location, preferences, and interest, now have to go through privacy infringement checks on ad platforms before they can market their products. My guess is that this will eventually lead to increased conversion rates and decreased precision of ad targeting because users can now opt-out of relevant ads and ask for their data to be deleted from the social platforms. (Source)That’s why dropshippers and other ecommerce business owners are now trying to go back to the basics – organic social media marketing – on all social platforms.
Best Social Media Platforms to Promote Dropshipping Business
These are some of the most used social channels for dropship marketing and promotion.
Facebook is the primary social channel for dropshippers. Most of them use Facebook Ads to market their stores directly to the relevant audience, apart from having their own pages where they post the products for organic reach. But, Facebook organic reach is too low and only reaches four percent to five percent of the total page fans.
Pinterest is another social media website that’s quite popular in the USA. It allows users to pin photos with a caption. They can also form boards where they can add relevant pins to increase their rankings. One affiliate website Survival life gets half of its traffic from Pinterest. As it is an image-based social media platform, using it for your dropshipping business would be a good idea.
Instagram is the new Facebook. It is the place where most generation Z internet users socialize. Users who have amassed a following on Instagram are known as Instagram Influencers. These are one of the best accounts to market your products on this social platform. Because influencers can provide you niche users, users that will actually buy your product. In fact, most dropshippers are doing this. One dropshipper made over $6000 in two weeks just by using influencers.
Snapchat
Snapchat is another social platform. It is unique in a way because content sent through it lasts only for a few seconds. Dropshippers can promote products to multiple users at the same time. This makes snapchat a great social channel to launch products and announce coupon codes.
Reddit is a social website where users interact with each other’s content by upvoting it. Most dropshippers use Reddit to get upvotes on their products. Posting on Reddit can also increase search engine rankings because Reddit registers links, which indirectly increase the page rank of the website.The founders of ThisiswhyIambroke also launched their website on Reddit.
Tips to Increase Reach on Social Media
Seasoned dropshippers are always focusing on new strategies that can increase their reach on social media. We have made a list of all these dropship businessmen don’t have to look anywhere else.
Promote in Groups
Quite obvious, but tests have proven time and time again that dropshippers can increase their product’s reach on social media by promoting them on various social media groups. Facebook has multiple groups, Pinterest has boards, where anyone can share their products. The products shared on these groups and boards are shown to a majority of the members who are active in that group. Group promotion is also encouraged by dropshipping experts as it increases the chances of getting more orders on Facebook.
Use Niche Influencers
Niche influencers can be found on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook to name a few. These niche influencers can help you get coverage for the launch or promotion of dropship products. Just search for influencers that are niche based and within your budget. Note that influencer marketing is a hit and miss, so there is no guarantee that you will receive orders.
Target Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags are also a great way to reach relevant people on social media. Dropshippers can use hashtags to promote on Instagram through relevant followers. In fact, a dropshipper made more than $12K by just promoting products with hashtags.
Use Automated Social Promotion Plugins
There are plugins available to promote dropshipping products. One plugin is Social Rabbit. It is a WordPress plugin that automatically gets the feed of your dropshipping store and makes social posts that can then be promoted to social channels including Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.It also comes with a social bot that automatically promotes account in various niche communities and groups.Other social post automation plugins that dropshippers can use include HootSuite, Social Champ, and Buffer.
Conduct Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes is an old way of creating brand awareness. It doesn’t directly translate in asale, but users will be able to collect information of participants. They can later send them promotional emails or turn them into warm leads through marketing automation process.
Use Microcontent
Microcontent is short form content made specifically for social media channels. For example, Love Food is offering social media content for users that they can use to create tasty recipes.
Use Blogs/Vlogs and to Show How Product Works
Blogging and vlogging is an old way of getting sales and orders for the dropshipping products but it is still effective. Most dropshippers write blogs telling about the benefits of their dropshipping products and then share them on social media channels. This helps them get more orders and traffic directly to their website.
Final Words!
Dropshipping has now become a full-fledge business model. Therefore, this is the right time to learn various ways to market and scale your business.Author Bio: Sajjad Shahid is an Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways - A Managed Ecommerce Hosting Platform. He loves helping out ecommerce store owners, merchants, and marketers in establishing their businesses and startups.Gravatar’s Email: sajjad.shahid@cloudways.comTwitter URL: https://twitter.com/i_sajjadshahid